Slowbox

Slowbox and Zerowin

Slowbox is a bot on FICS. It plays chess 24/7 using the stockfish engine to select its moves. Its primary goal is to run strong engines on weak hardware, which matches interestingly against weaker engines on the fastest hardware. Robbolito gave the first opportunity toward this end, but experience with stockfish elsewhere led to a rapid switch. Slowbox permits extensive unrated play, and it also kibitzes its thinking frequently. Both of these help foster interest in computer chess by providing a useful opponent to engine authors and operators alike.

Hardware

Linksys WRV-54G router (266 Mhz XScale, 32MB RAM, 8MB flash)

(previously)

Seagate Dockstar (1.2 Ghz Kirkwood SoC, throttled to match WRV-54G, 128MB RAM, 256MB flash)

Linksys WRV-54G router (266 Mhz XScale, 32MB RAM, 8MB flash)

Actiontec GT-701 DSL Modem (150 Mhz AR7, 16 MB RAM, 4 MB flash)

Operating System

OpenWrt (r7210-14cb05909a)

Software

icsdroneng 0.29

polyglot 1.4.70b

Stockfish dev

timeseal

Polyglot

Book: polyglot book_small.bin

Hash: 4 MB

Move Overhead: 1000

Speed

./stockfish bench 1 1 10
===========================
Total time (ms) : 68495
Nodes searched  : 893036
Nodes/second    : 13037

History

• Jul 03, 2018 Switched to WRV-54g. I needed its switch 24/7 for other home network reasons, and this box is much easier to administer because of its larger RAM and NAND.
• Jun 20, 2018 Restored and running Stockfish dev after success getting std::Thread to work with musl. Other changes required adding '-DPAWN_HASH_SIZE=2048' and setting the default Hash to 1 MB instead of 16.
• Jun 30, 2017 Taken offline. I'm pretty much done with the hobby.
• Nov 05, 2016 Back to the Actiontec!! Thanks to Ronald de Man's (Cfish author) help, I was able to get Stockfish 8 running reliably on the GT-701. The code is slightly modified from Cfish 8. It uses a smaller pawn hash, defaults to 1 MB hash, Large Pages off, and internally represents itself as Stockfish since that's the engine the box is approved for.
• Nov 02, 2016 Solved the crashing bug running Stockfish with the musl libc. See here to understand the problem and get a solution.
• Aug 19, 2016 Changed to Seagate Dockstar hardware because I'm using the Linksys WRV54G to try to solve bugs with Stockfish and the OpenWrt Toolchain. This process is in semi-limbo ATM as I am stuck, so I have speed reduced the dockstar to give similar performance in order to not have to reflash the WRV54G. The goal here is to run slowbox eventually on the Actiontec again (about 1/3 current speed), but I can't do that until I solve a bug. The WRV54G is the best hardware to solve this issue because it has much larger flash and memory than the Actiontec, yet it exhibits the same problem.
• Jun 30, 2016 2061 days online, 88.1% since Feb. 2010
• Jan 06, 2016 Updated to Stockfish 7.
• May 30, 2015 I tried to get the Stockfish master branch working on the previous Actiontec GT-701 for 3 days without success. I did get Stockfish 6 working, but that was the limit that this hardware could run reliably. So I abandoned the GT-701, reluctantly, in order to be able to run more recent Stockfish versions. The WRV54G is almost 3x faster.
• May 27, 2015 Approved to run Stockfish. Also updated hardware.
• Mar 6, 2014 Approved to run Toga II, put back online. (% of life online reduced from 95.2% to 83.6!)
• Sep 5, 2013 Taken offline.
• Aug 14, 2013 The box had shown signs of instability around Feb 2013, and I thought I was going to have to take it down or replace it. (Replacement would almost be worse since I don't have access to another box this slow. I have faster candidates, but that sort of defeats the whole idea of this engine.) But luckily since then, the box has been very stable.
• Jan 25, 2013 Updated box to also run icsdrone + polyglot + timeseal instead of just the engine via ssh. Due to very tight memory on the box, I felt the box running just the engine process would be superior. This was leading to frequent time losses, so now despite more memory from auxillary programs, it does better.
• Jan 21, 2013 Updated icsdroneng to 0.28.
• Sep 21, 2012 added support for wild games excluding FR
• Feb 2, 2010 Approved for RobboLito, operation began. The hardware running SlowBox was briefly used for TogaRouter in 2008.